As the Lunar New Year approaches—a time to bid farewell to the old and welcome the new—it is also a moment worth reflecting:
Over the past year, have you fallen victim to rug pulls? Did you end up "bag-holding" after following a KOL's hype? Or suffered losses from phishing attacks by clicking malicious links or signing fraudulent contracts?
The Spring Festival itself doesn’t create risks—but it can amplify them. With more frequent fund movements, distracted attention, and faster trading decisions, even small mistakes can lead to losses.
If you are planning to adjust your portfolio or reorganize funds around the holiday period, consider giving your wallet a pre-holiday security checkup. This guide reviews several common real-world risk scenarios and outlines practical steps everyday users can take.
1. Stay Vigilant Against AI "Deepfakes" and Voice Cloning
The recent viral spread of SeeDance 2.0 has once again reminded people of a reality: in the age of accelerating AGI adoption, the assumptions that “seeing is believing” and “hearing is proof” no longer hold.
Since 2025, AI-powered video and voice fraud technologies have become highly mature. Voice cloning, face swapping, real-time facial expression imitation, and tone simulation have entered a low-barrier, scalable stage.
Today, AI can accurately replicate a person’s voice, speaking pace, pauses, and even subtle facial expressions. During the Spring Festival, this risk becomes especially pronounced.
For example, while traveling home or attending a family gathering, you may receive a message from a “friend” in your contact list via Telegram or WeChat. The message may include a voice or video call claiming their account is restricted, asking for help circulating “red-packet” funds, or requesting a small temporary token transfer.
The voice sounds perfectly natural and seamless. The video even shows the person’s face. When your attention is distracted by holiday activities, how would you verify its authenticity?
In previous years, video verification was considered highly reliable. Today, however, even real-time video communication is no longer 100% trustworthy.
In this context, simply checking a video or listening to a voice message is insufficient for verification.The most robust approach is to establish an "out-of-band" verification mechanism with your inner circle—such as family and business partners—using offline passphrases or details that cannot be inferred from public information.
Another common risk path that deserves renewed attention is links forwarded by acquaintances. During the Spring Festival, promotions such as “on-chain red packets” or “airdrop rewards” often spread rapidly within the Web3 community. Many users are not deceived by strangers but by trusting links shared by people they know, which lead to carefully disguised authorization pages.
Remember this simple but critical rule:
Do not click unknown links directly from social platforms, and never grant authorization—even if they come from someone you know.
All on-chain operations should be performed through official channels, bookmarked websites, or trusted entry points—not through chat windows.
2. Perform a “Year-End Cleanup” of Your Wallet
If the first category of risk comes from trust being compromised by technology, the second comes from hidden risk exposure accumulated over time.
Authorization is one of the most fundamental—and most easily overlooked—mechanisms in the DeFi ecosystem. When interacting with a DApp, you are essentially granting a smart contract permission to manage your tokens. This authorization may be one-time or unlimited, temporary or long-term, and may remain active long after you have forgotten about it.
While authorization is not necessarily an immediate threat, it represents an ongoing risk exposure. Many users mistakenly believe that if their assets are not stored in a contract, there is no security concern. However, during bull markets, users frequently try new protocols, participate in airdrops, stake assets, and interact on-chain. Authorization records accumulate over time, and even after a protocol is no longer used, its permissions may remain active.
Over time, these unnecessary historical approvals resemble unused keys left unmanaged. If a forgotten protocol later suffers a contract vulnerability, losses can easily occur.
The Spring Festival provides a natural opportunity to organize and review these risks. Taking advantage of the relatively calm period before the holiday to systematically check your authorization records is highly recommended.
Specifically, you should:
- Revoke authorizations that are no longer in use, especially unlimited approvals.
- Use limited approvals for high-value assets rather than granting full balance access.
- Separate long-term holdings from daily operational funds by adopting a layered structure of cold and hot wallets.
In the past, users relied on external tools (such as revoke.cash) to review permissions. Today, mainstream Web3 wallets like imToken have supported authorization management features, allowing users to view and revoke historical approvals directly within the wallet.
Ultimately, wallet security is not about never granting permissions—it is about following the principle of least privilege: grant only what is necessary and revoke access when it is no longer needed.
3. Do Not Lower Your Guard During Travel and Social Activities
If the first two risks stem from technological evolution and accumulated permissions, the third comes from changing environments.
Spring Festival travel—returning home, visiting relatives, or taking trips—often involves frequent device switching, complex network environments, and intensive social interactions. Under these conditions, vulnerabilities in private key management and daily operations become significantly amplified.
Mnemonic phrase management is a typical example. Saving mnemonic phrases as screenshots in a phone gallery, storing them in cloud drives, or sending them to yourself through messaging apps may seem convenient, but in mobile scenarios this convenience becomes a major security risk.
Always remember: mnemonic phrases must remain physically isolated and should never be stored online. The fundamental rule of private key security is to keep it offline.
Social settings also require strong privacy boundaries. Displaying large asset balances or discussing portfolio sizes during gatherings may be unintentional, but it can expose you to future risks. You should also remain vigilant against individuals who encourage you to download wallet applications or browser extensions under the pretext of “sharing experience” or “providing guidance.”
All wallet downloads and updates should be completed through official channels, not through links shared in chat conversations.
Before making any transfer, always verify three elements: network, address, and amount. Numerous cases have shown that even large holders have suffered major losses from address poisoning attacks involving similar-looking wallet addresses. Such phishing attacks have become increasingly industrialized in recent months.
Attackers typically generate large numbers of addresses with matching prefixes and suffixes as a seed database. When an address interacts with external transfers, attackers identify similar addresses from their database and initiate related transactions, casting a wide net in hopes that users will mistakenly copy and use the wrong address.
Because some users copy addresses directly from transaction history and only verify the first and last characters, they become vulnerable to such attacks. As SlowMist founder Yu Xian describes, phishing attacks targeting address similarities are essentially “net-casting attacks—a probability game.”
Due to extremely low gas costs, attackers can poison hundreds or even thousands of addresses in bulk. A single successful attack can generate profits far exceeding the cost.
These risks are not primarily about technical complexity—they are about everyday operational habits:
- Always verify the full address, not just the first and last characters.
- Do not copy transfer addresses directly from transaction history without verification.
- When transferring to a new address, send a small test transaction first.
- Use address whitelists whenever possible to manage frequently used addresses.
In today’s decentralized ecosystem, which is still dominated by EOA accounts, users remain both the first and last line of defense. (Further reading: The $3.35B “Account Tax”: When EOA Becomes a Systemic Cost, What Can AA Offer?”)
Final Thoughts
Many people believe the on-chain world is inherently dangerous and unfriendly to ordinary users.
In reality, while Web3 may not offer a zero-risk environment, it can become a manageable one.
The Spring Festival is a time when life slows down, making it an ideal opportunity to review your security risks. Rather than rushing through operations during the holiday, it is better to complete security checks in advance. Instead of responding after incidents occur, optimize your permissions and operational habits beforehand.
We wish you a safe and prosperous Spring Festival, and may your on-chain assets remain secure and worry-free in the year ahead.
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